


Piquant

by zvi



Series: Fast of the Senses [2]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Other, post-TSbyBS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-03-19
Updated: 2001-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:37:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zvi/pseuds/zvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair comes home. He doesn't find what he's expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piquant

**Author's Note:**

> 1) The recipe referred to in the story can be found at <http://home.att.net/~ashburysaubergines/s/r977.htm>.
> 
> 2) Thanks to Diana Williams for asking if I had said what I meant, and The GIND for saying it was good in the first place.

"Hey, Jim! I'm home!" This is not a casual event. Blair has been gone for a month, roaming territory he'd discovered as a child with Naomi, investigating opportunities for a fraudulent former doctoral candidate, thinking about stepping inside that thin blue line. He is a little afraid of what he will find as he enters. Hopes to discover Jim anxiously awaiting his answer about the academy. But he expects to be warmly welcomed, he expects to have been missed.

He does not expect to find a warm crockpot on the stove, a lonely little note above it informing him:

> Chief,
> 
> Rafe got injured and sent to the hospital, and there wasn't anybody else to buddy up with H on a stakeout tonight. I'm sorry. See you in the morning.
> 
>  
> 
> Jim
> 
> P.S. It's a curry soup. Eat as much as you want.

It's just as well, he thinks. He learned something last night that changes everything maybe. This way, he can finish his meal without Jim waiting on his every word, watching him eat. Lifts up the lid of the trash thinking he'll see a container telling him where the soup came from, but the bag is empty and new.

He throws his junk in his room, grabs a towel, and goes to take a shower. When he gets back to his room, he notices that it is as well-ordered as it was after his second trip to Peru, when Jim put all of his things away while he recovered from pneumonia. He starts to smile, but the memory is too sad for that, really. Gets a pair of jeans from his dresser and notes with some surprise that Jim has let a layer of dust settle on the wood. Decides the loft is warm enough to go without a shirt, and braids his hair in two thick cornrows instead of brushing it. He'll pay for that, but it's better than letting his hair air dry. He's got a radically shorter 'do now, but that doesn't change his head's basic curly nature.

He walks into the kitchen and rereads the note. Opens the fridge, hoping to see a carton telling him the soup is Vietnamese, he's dying for Vietnamese, but finds nothing of the sort. Blair decides he's not hungry. He clumps into the living room and thinks about watching TV. Realizes he has no idea what's on, but also knows that Jim has pre-programmed the preview channel into the remote. Despite an increased channel selection from the last time he saw a TV (what might Oxygen be? or or Starz! ?), nothing sounds appealing.

He wanders back in the kitchen. Reads the note. Grabs a slice of bread. Nearly gags when he realizes he's eating white bread. Makes a mental note to lecture Jim on the similarities between white flour, processed sugar, and cocaine. Starts to put the bread in the compost bucket when he sees an eggplant skin in there. Looks more closely, and can make out garlic paper and the stem of what could be a zucchini. Blair has a recipe for a summer curry soup that calls for eggplant and zuchinni and garlic.

He heads to his room, starts to unpack. Realizes that it's not so much a question of unpacking his clothes, but throwing them out. Only the jeans are wearable, although it's generous to call them jeans. In their thin, well-holed condition, lingerie is equally appropriate. Grins as he thinks about walking around campus when the new crop of freshman get in. He's gotten used to thinking about Rainier, it's no longer a mental sore tooth. But he loses his grin when he thinks about wearing them near Jim, and some of the things he's learned about sentinels and guides and senses and insanity.

Goes back in the kitchen, finally tastes the soup. It is his summer soup recipe, which he loves and almost never makes. It is very good, yet too hot and spicy for a sentinel, but Jim made it, and he hates it.

* * *

Jim staggers into the apartment around 3 AM. He'd caught Blair's scent in the stairwell, so Blair was back. Which was good, because he had missed Blair.

He drops his keys in the basket, kicks his boots off. Bends over and lines them up neatly by the door. Bangs his head with the doorknob.

Jim is not thinking clearly. He walks into the kitchen and sees the crockpot. His nose is full of Blair, his mouth is daydreaming about blairpudding, blairsicles, blairberry jam. Only his eyes are paying attention to the soup, and all they see are chopped up vegetables in a pale, reddish base. He thinks it's very kind of Blair to have made him a tomato soup. He picks up a spoon.

Blair screams his name.

Jim drops the spoon.

"Curry, man, curry. Hot, spicy. Sentinel-murdering stuff. How the hell'd you make this?" Blair approaches and pulls him away from the offending potage.

Jim frowns. He's hungry and the soup is warm. "Taste at 1, smell at 2, wear gloves. And I got Mrs. Pasteur across the way to chop the onions. Raw onions are killer." He walks over to the refrigerator. There should be cold pizza.

Pizza, good pizza, is good cold.

He gets out the pizza. It is very good pizza. It will be better warm. He gets out a small metal tray, slides it in the toaster oven. Takes a bite of the pizza. Realizes his mistake. Re-opens the toaster oven, puts the pizza on the tray, slides it in, and turns it to toast. Turns around and looks at Blair, who is fairly cute and fuzzy looking.

Jim thinks that the kid looks pretty good with less hair, although he's not wild about the braids. Is really glad Blair wrote to say that the hair had been chopped off, because the kid doesn't really look like a kid anymore. Blair's lost enough weight that his natural stockiness doesn't look like babyfat, and the short curls let his eyes pop out of his face. He's tan, too, darker than the pale gold of his winter skin. He looks like a grown up, now, instead of a college student. Even if his mouth is opening and closing in a bizarre approximation of a goldfish as he approaches Jim.

When Blair's just a foot away, Jim reaches out and lays his hand on a sturdy shoulder, squeezes. "I missed you, fishface." Pulls his friend in for a tight hug. Is startled as hell when Blair kisses him, full on the lips, slips him some tongue.

The kiss is too dry, awkward in its unexpectedness, its surprise. It tasted good, though. "Chief?"

"I'm sorry, Jim. You weren't here, but you made curry. It took me a while to figure out why that was so wrong, and it scared me when I did." Blair reaches up to run his hands through his hair, and encounters the cornrows. "Damn it!"

The toaster oven dings. Jim is off again, his attention caught by hot cheese and the really good tomato sauce he can smell. The combination of fresh and dry herbs in the sauce is something spectacular, and Blair is being weirder than usual. It happens sometimes in the middle of the night, and usually, if Jim can leave him alone, his roommate reverts to normal.

"Some of the people I went to visit knew about sentinels, Jim. I met three guides, one sentinel, and one pre-adolescent potential sentinel." There's a harsh burst of laughter, but it's more rueful than derisive. "One of Naomi's fuckbuddies is a guide, Jim. This guy was like an uncle to me when I was growing up. There's a community of sentinels and guides, and Mark warned them all away while I was trying to do research. Now that I've been thoroughly discredited by discovering a genuine sentinel, they figured it was safe to talk to me, let me in on all of the insider information."

Jim's eyes widen at this and he walks back over to Blair and nudges with his hip. It's pretty stupid as gestures of support go, but his mouth is full and both of his hands are greasy and sauce-stained.

Blair smiles, but he's not showing any teeth. "Like how to manage our sex life."

Jim frowns. He frowns a lot, because sexuality is one of those things he can't not know about as a sentinel. He knows that Henry swings both ways, and that Rafe might if women didn't frighten him so much he stuck exclusively to H. He knows that Simon is the straightest man on the planet, although his tastes are even more catholic than Blair's. And he knows that Blair likes women ninety percent of the time, and he's pretty damn sure that the other ten percent Blair still hasn't worked up the courage to act on. He shrugs his shoulders, indicating that Blair should continue.

"Apparently, I should be, uh, penetrating you. Orally and anally. Bareback."

This is not an idea that Jim is opposed to in the abstract, but in this particular instant, Blair's voice is small and wet and broken-sounding. He doesn't like that at all. He swallows hastily. "Blair, you're an anthropologist. I know you're all for exploring different cultures, but if you don't want to be part of their little group, we won't. It's not like we haven't done all right by ourselves."

"Yeah, I know you're right. I knew it when they told me that I'd been, uh, neglecting you that way." Blair sighs, that little sigh of disappointment he used to get when one of his brighter students made an elementary error. "There was just this little moment of terror...." Suddenly Blair is staring hard into Jim, staring him down. He has to look away. "They told me that sentinels go crazy without constant exposure to their guide."

And Jim can't help it, he bursts out laughing. Spews microscopic chunks of green pepper across the floor.

He can smell Blair get angry, the kind of anger that covers fear. "What the fuck is so funny, man? I came home to a pot of fucking. Curry. Soup. Yesterday, Mark tells me that when he said quote-unquote constant exposure he meant a goddamn rolling orgy. And you blunder into the loft in the middle of the night like you don't even know I'm here. I'm not laughing, Jim."

"Chief, Blair, bubeleh," which is wrong of him, he knows Blair can't stand when he uses Yiddish expressions, but the kid is so goddamned funny sometimes. "I hallucinate from a single dose of cough medicine. Breathing in a little Golden made me blind for a week. Sniffing opium paste on prayer beads knocked me off my fucking feet. I don't need a lot of anything for it to affect me." He stops, takes a bite, waits for Blair to get it.

Blair stares at him blankly, like he's out of his fucking mind. "And?"

"I'm living in a little blairdust cloud, Chief. You're all over the loft, all over my truck, in my clothes. You've shed 12 hairs that I've noticed during the course of this conversation, your scent hasn't disappeared from this loft in all the time you've been gone, and you kept sending me post cards that smelled like your socks." He took another bite of his pizza. This stuff was good.

Blair smacks himself in the forehead, kind of hard. Does it again. "I don't know why I fucking cared." The grin this time is toothy and wide.

Jim smirks at him, gets another slice. It's been a good day. The stakeout ended in an arrest and Blair got home. And the pizza tastes better the second day.


End file.
